Chris Christie, moderate, establishment, won in a blow-out in a blue state.
E.W. Jackson, bat-shit crazy even for the Tea Party, got crushed in a purple state.
Ken Cuccinelli, just normal bat-shit crazy, barely lost in the above mentioned purple state.
What will the Tea Party spin on this be?
YES! They will ignore Christie and Jackson and insist that if only the Establishment Republicans had backed Cuccinelli he would have totally won Virginia! It's all the fault of Establishment, Sell-Out, RINO Republicans that we don't have a Republican in the Virginia governor's mansion for the next four years.
Now, Cuccinelli did get outspent by a large margin and the pundits were all predicting a cake-walk for McAuliffe, so the TP may have a tiny, tiny point. The RNC pretty much left Cuccinelli on his own. If he had more funding and if his buddy Ted Cruz hadn't given a goodly number of voters in Northern Virginia an unwanted 2-week vacation, who knows?
Terry McAuliffe was hardly the best candidate the Democrats could have fielded. Probably any candidate other than Cuccinelli would have won handily. Cuccinelli knew he would never win the nomination in a primary so he engineered a state convention instead. The Tea Party dominated the convention and gave the nomination to him (and to E.W. Jackson, but we are not going to talk about that, are we?).
So the most likely outcome of last night is that the Tea Party is going to turn its full fury away from Democrats and against the Republican Establishment. Sell-Outs! RINOS!!!!!!! They are going to really ramp it up for the 2014 elections. They already have Mitch McConnell in their sights. I believe there is rumblings about taking on Boehner. Yep, the next few years are going to be interesting.